304717 - "setting a property that has only a getter" message has no frame of reference

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: JavaScript Engine, defect)

Description

[Jack Eidsness]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050811 Firefox/1.0+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050811 Firefox/1.0+

This error message comes up in the javascript console, and there are other bugs
related to the "when" of it's appearance ( bug 270734 , bug 304181 ) but my
complaint is due to the nature of the message itself, regardless of whether its
appearance is (ever) appropriate. 

The error message includes no frame of reference, so any of its appearances
would be fundamentally useless.  It could easily say "something is wrong with
something somewhere" and produce the same results.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. set a property that has only a getter (I am kidding - I actually have no idea
why the error message appears, because it has no explanation)

Actual Results:  
I got confused.

Expected Results:  
Give a reference to a point in the DOM or chrome or a line in a file somewhere.

Comment 1

[Yuh-Ruey Chen]

Not sure what you mean by "frame of reference", but I am seeing the line number. If you're talking about the description of the error and how it doesn't specify the object and property, then yes, this would be valid.

Comment 2

[Jack Eidsness]

It sounds like someone fixed the getter/setter message without awareness of this bug.  I haven't noticed the getter/setter error in quite some time, anyway.

I'd hoped to see a fix for the universal problem of errors without filename and line #, but I wouldn't have submitted a bug without a particular example.  That being said, I can't as easily justify asking someone else's time for that because it hardly affects me anymore.  Before the console^2 extension (or before I knew it existed), it was easy to confuse mozilla's internal errors with the content's errors, but now that that's addressable in some way, the problem is less of a problem for the end user (me).

If you want something similar to look at, when closing some tabs today I got  "Error: this.docShell has no properties
Source file: chrome://global/content/bindings/browser.xml"
without a line number.  At least it has a file name, unlike the erstwhile getter/setter message.

The idea is that an error message is just noise if it doesn't leave a trail to follow for a fix.

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Not a JS engine issue.

This is an issue in the JS engine consumer (who doesn't pass in a line number).  I'll bet $10 that it's an event handler, which is something we have existing bugs on.